The Rev. Dennis McManus will discuss The Holocaust Matrix: Its Destructive Past and Its Dangerous Future at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, November 4, at The 19th Monsignor John M. Oesterreicher Memorial Lecture. The program is hosted by The Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies. Sponsored by the Msgr. J. M. Oesterreicher Endowment, the event is free and open to the community. The event will take place at Seton Hall University’s Walsh University Library Beck Rooms, 400 South Orange, NJ.

”The many-faceted work of the Reverend Dr. Dennis McManus provides a background for his insights into the Shoah (Holocaust) and implications for continuing reflection on this important topic.” (Father Lawrence Frizzell, Director, The Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies).

The Rev. Dennis McManus, Ph.D., teaches at St. John’s Seminary in Boston and at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is Consultant for Jewish Affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and belongs to the Church Relations Committee of the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum. Since 1997 he has been very active in the Anti-Defamation League/USCCB joint program in Holocaust Education “Bearing Witness,” offered nationally in Catholic dioceses. He is director of the Jan Karski Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Georgetown University. He has contributed to the Cambridge Dictionary of Christian-Jewish Relations (2005) and to Ancient Christian Commentary (InterVarsity Press). His forthcoming book will address the achievements of Pope Benedict XVI with the Jewish community.

Monsignor Oesterreicher, a European-born Jew who converted to Catholicism at the age of 20, devoted his early years in the priesthood to parish work, ecumenism and peace. During the years of Nazi persecution he combatted Adolph Hitler’s glorification of race and hatred for Jews, eventually escaping from the Gestapo in 1938 via Switzerland and Paris and travelling circuitously through Spain and Portugal, finally arriving in the United States in 1940. After serving in several parishes in New York City, he was invited to Seton Hall University in March 1953 and became founding director of the Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies.

The late Monsignor Oesterreicher wrote in The Rediscovery of Judaism (1971), “True sensitivity sees not only the volcano of evil that erupted in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen, but also the ultimate failure of the greatest poisoner of history; for all his success, he did not triumph. Horrible though it was, the ‘Final Solution’ was anything but final. Six million Jews died, but the Jewish people lives. What this sentence really means is exemplified by the State of Israel. Here, an ancient people that for almost two thousand years was severed from the soil, that as a whole had not been involved in statecraft, that in the days of Hitler had been defaced in every possible way, was rejuvenated.”